Early Days
by Firebirdie
Summary: She's a rookie hunter out to make a name for herself. He's a cynical ex-FBI agent with a price on his head. They fight crime. Well, ghosts, anyway.


**A/N:** Have some Jo Harvelle and Victor Henricksen, because they were awesome and I miss them. Written in 2011, set during an AU Season 4 where Henricksen survived "Jus in Bello." Oneshot.

**Early Days**

**o.O.o**

Jo pursed her lips, knife flashing between her fingers as she examined the newspaper clippings and scribbled case notes on the wall of her hotel room. Evelyn Yates, mother of three grown children, just moved into one of the swanky homes in a sprawling housing development a few miles out of Dubuque. And she died there, after weeks of worrying about the smell of smoke clinging to the place, and the sooty footprints left across her carpet.

The neighborhood had the highest number of house fires per capita in the state. And, according to the local newspaper archives, the first to burn was the farmhouse owned by one Benjamin Roberts, back when the land was nothing but fields of corn, nearly fifty years ago. The fire cleared the way for the development, conveniently, since Roberts had been fighting it tooth and nail. Without a house, the guy had become a permanent fixture at Eddie's Bar down the road (since replaced by a McDonald's), and died in a brawl with one of the realtors for the blossoming slice of middle-class American Dream. The realtor didn't come back to town.

Jo figured Roberts was still pissed off about it all, and decided to take out his frustrations on the suburbanites on what he felt was his rightful property. Straightforward salt-and-burn, the kind her dad used to finish within a few days of arriving. He'd come home, then, sometimes smelling a little like dirt and fire, and hug her until she squeaked, and tell Mom he'd been fine, easy job, no problem, really. Jo came to suspect it was a lot tougher than he let on, but still. Shouldn't be too bad.

She packed up, salt and accelerant and a shovel in a duffle, knife at her side, shotgun in hand. Time to desecrate some graves.

She'd snagged a piece-of-crap red pickup truck for three hundred bucks at a salvage yard much like Bobby Singer's, and it coughed and sputtered as she drove it to Harrison Cemetery, on the outskirts of town.

Roberts' corpse was already disinterred when she arrived, and it was smoking gently, reduced to so much charred ash and bone. Jo stood over the open grave, shovel on her shoulder, and sighed. Okay, so maybe not with the whole establish-some-hunter-credit thing. She spared a moment to wonder who'd beaten her to the graveyard, but it was nearly dawn by then and there were other things to hunt. She returned to the hotel, flipped on the news—she'd grown up at the Roadhouse; she liked the low hum of background noise—and started taking down the obituaries and notes that mercifully obscured the strawberry and blackberry patterned wallpaper.

That was when the news broke about another house fire in the same neighborhood, happening _now._

Clearly, she and the other hunter, whoever it was, had missed something.

Jo took off for the still-burning house, mingling with the gaping ordinary folk, furiously racking her brain for whatever could have caused this. She hadn't found any other obvious vengeful spirit candidates in the obits . . . Maybe Roberts was attached to an object? Or the land itself, somehow. And wouldn't that be fun.

"Do you know what caused this?" a man asked, somewhere off to her left. The fire department had gotten the blaze mostly under control, the sirens off, the smoke hanging thick in the muggy summer air.

A firefighter shook her head in reply. "Nope," she said. "This is the second weird one we've had in as many weeks, but it doesn't look like they're related."

_That's what they always say,_ Jo thought, watching the man out of the corner of her eye. Tall, black, brisk manner, carried himself like he knew what he was doing. There was mud on his boots and jeans. His lips pressed together in an almost-grimace at the firefighter's words, but he nodded and melted into the small crowd of onlookers.

Jo followed, sidling between a ferrety middle-management type and a walking green bathrobe in hair curlers.

**o.O.o**

Victor Henricksen, while not exactly satisfied with his life, never woke up and decided to drop everything and become a hunter. It just sort of . . . happened. Well, it was mostly the Winchesters' fault, and in his darker moments he'd happily blame them for the mess his life had become, but for the most part, the events leading up to his exit from the FBI were happenstance and random chance.

. . . Fine. He went looking for trouble. How could he not? He chased those hunters back and forth across the continental US for months, he got possessed by a creature he'd've sworn didn't exist, and he barely escaped death at the hands of its friends. Thrown into a shadow world where nightmares were real and waiting and hungry, what other option did he have but to keep his eyes open? Purely in his capacity as an FBI agent, of course.

Then it all sort of went sideways.

The Cincinnati thing, just a month after his near-demon experience, was a mess from beginning to end. Apparently, the boss of the demons from Colorado wanted him out of the picture, and wasn't above sending her minions to possess the local cops. One thing led to another, and he wound up shooting one of them, for all the good it did. And this in full view of his new partner and half the police force. That made him many, many friends among his colleagues.

So Victor hightailed it out of Cincinnati, crossing the river to Newport, Kentucky, and wound up in the Newport Aquarium. Six hours of hiding there in the miserable wee hours of a Tuesday morning? Not fun. He never wanted to see another hagfish again. Ever.

Further south, then west—he ran and disappeared, melting into middle America, into the Winchester's world. With demons on his trail, as a bonus.

Hunting was the logical next step. He evaded his human and demonic pursuers as well as he could, and apparently he'd managed to shake them off, because he hadn't seen or heard from them for a while. By June, he'd taken care of two ghosts and a shapeshifter on his own. So when houses started burning in a Dubuque suburb, he made his way there as quickly as his stolen blue Ford could carry him.

**o.O.o**

"It's a fire spirit!" Jo hissed, slamming the book down on the table and drawing an irritated glare from the librarian at the front desk. But still—ghosts didn't leave _footprints_, they left ectoplasm, if anything, and that should've been a red flag—

Someone cleared his throat behind her. Jo turned, smiling charmingly, and suppressed a jolt of surprise. "Can I help you?"

Tall, Dark, and Sneaky shifted his weight slightly. "Are you a hunter?" he asked.

"Are you?"

He shook his head. "I guess I am."

She considered. ". . . Yes. Last night, in the cemetery—you torched Roberts?"

"Yeah, for all the good that did."

Jo tapped the book she'd been reading, a local history. "Looks like it wasn't him. I'm thinking it's an elemental—Roberts had a couple nasty brush fires on his property, but he always managed to put them out before they could do too much damage. This thing's just getting angrier and angrier as more people trample its land."

The guy's eyebrows shot up. "You been doing this a long time?"

Jo shrugged. "My dad was a hunter, and my mom ran a bar they'd stop at. I guess I picked some stuff up."

The guy nodded thoughtfully. "Well. I'm brand new. Think this is a two-person job?"

He might be new, but he was good, putting everything together as fast as he did, even if they'd both gotten it wrong. "I wouldn't say no to backup."

"All right, then." He smiled a little, held out his hand. "Victor Henricksen."

She shook it. "Jo Harvelle. Let's go kill something."

**o.O.o**

So it turned out Victor was a former fed, he'd legally killed the Winchesters, and he could speed through a banishing spell with the best of them.

Sloshing liquid nitrogen, liberated from the local high school's chemistry lab, at the fire elemental, Jo figured that as hunting partners went, she couldn't do much better.

**o.O.o**

_end_


End file.
